Islamic fundamentalists want it to be a holy war. As long as they are in the minority, which they are, this is not a holy war. Unless we are stuipid enough to give them what they want and make it a holy war. If we do that, and we make it a holy war, and we alienate the moderate and liberal Muslims and turn them against us, then we will know suffering like most of them do.
But what we have now is nothing like a holy war. It is bad, and it is heading in the wrong direction, but it is far from qualifying as that.
I just thought that point had to be made.
Also, Reeshy didn't say were were targeting civilians. I don't want to speak for him, but I thought he was pointing out the fact that civilian casualties are being shown on Arab television and that is making us more hated.
My own thoughts are that civilian casualties are an inevitable fact of war, but that the US doesn't quite think of civilian casualties in the same way that most of the rest of the world does. We haven't suffered civilian casualties, (in any significant numbers), in over 150 years because we haven't had a war fought on our soil since the Civil War. There aren't many other places on the earth that can say that, and I think that makes for some of the profound differences in the way we look at war compared to the way the rest of the world does. It makes us tend to recognize the cost of war less in human terms, and less so before the war than after it.
Either way, civilian casualties are going to be a weapon that will be used against us, not because they are shown on Arab TV, and not because we are targetting civilians, but because this was our decision to make this war. We took on that responsibility and it is going to cost us in blood, treasure, and prestige. It's a difficult situation, (and one we should have learned from Vietnam), but it is our burden. The only thing we can do is make sure our leadership is making the best decisions about how the war is conducted - do we have enough troops? are decisions being made for domestic political considerations and not military? do we think we need more of these kinds of wars or not? Being that we have a democracy, it is as much our responsibility to make good decisions as it is for our representatives.
<img src="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=bonedaddy5">
Fuck it from behind.
This message was edited by Yerdaddy on 9-18-04 @ 6:03 PM